Friday, April 19, 2002

Another long break without an entry. I'm almost ashamed at taking this long between writings, but I find other things to occupy my time.

I had no DSL last weekend, which sucked, as one might imagine. Liz was uptown on Friday night and Saturday, so I had the entire place to myself for 36 hours. I had planned an extended Jedi Knight II saberfest, but that plan went out along with the DSL. Instead I watched some TV and started learning Galactic Battlegrounds, the new Star Wars RTS game. That turned into this week's major time-suck, but that's another excuse for not writing. Anyway, back to the DSL problem. The guy I'd talked to on Friday night had said that the second-level support staff was checking my circuit and it might be up to 72 hours (not including Sunday) until they called me with an update. As I waited for the call, I looked into getting Earthlink Cable instead. Before I made that call on Sunday night I called Earthlink's tech support again, just to get an update. On the first try I got a second-level engineer. That never happens. You always get the first-level help desk people who think all problems are with your PC and not your line. This engineer spent about an hour on the phone with me, checking all sorts of things and filling out new trouble tickets. Finally, he scheduled a Covad engineer to come to my apartment on Monday afternoon. When that guy showed up (only kept me waiting an hour, thankfully), we found that some Verizon flunky had been in the basement phone cabinet and disconnected my DSL wire pair. A quick reconnect and call to tech support later, my broadband was back. So the phone call about cable is off for the moment. Considering the way the phone cabinet looks, and that my wires aren't labeled, it's a wonder that this kind of problem hasn't happened before. The next time it does, I'm not wasting much time waiting; I'm getting cable.